Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Just a heads up--in advance of the Spoleto Festival we've given the other pages at MikeDaisey.com a decent scrubbing and sprucing, so if you haven't checked them out in awhile, now might be a good time to kick the tires.

Am I allowed to write that I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the President of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands?

Let me be clear that I have no wish to perform such a deed in fact…. I seek only to gauge what level of discourse is still acceptable in this country by asking, in the hope that I might someday participate in that discourse, whether I am free to posit that it would probably be great fun, and a boon to all mankind, if i were to slaughter the president of the United States with my bare hands?

….In place of the initial question I might ask instead, “Am I allowed to write that I would like to kidnap George W. Bush and fly him to a prison in some faraway land where his ‘rights’ are no longer an issue, there to put a bag over his head and making him stand for hours on one leg while I defecate on his New Testament before chaining his arms to the ceiling until he dies of a heart attack, after which I will claim that he never existed?”

Sunday, May 28, 2006

The Republic of Namibia - the impoverished country of 1.8 million known for its wild remoteness - not only welcomed the movie stars, it handed over control of its international land borders and airspace to them.

As the world awaited the birth of the child at a luxury villa complex on the coast, Namibian authorities said they had bowed to pressure from Jolie and Pitt and granted them the right to ban foreign journalists from entering the country - a remarkable move for the Government of any sovereign state.

Saturday, May 27, 2006

Zagreb's city councillors have delivered a posthumous apology to their compatriot Nikola Tesla, one of the pioneers of modern electrical engineering, for failing to recognise his genius, officials said Thursday.

The city council met on Wednesday, exactly 114 years after Tesla presented Zagreb's then mayor with the idea of introducing electric street lightning to the city.

The city authorities told the young inventor they did not understand his vision and turned down his project, before introduced electric lighting 15 years later.

Friday, May 26, 2006

(Come early—standing room and wait list available at the door, and we'll seat as many as we can!)

GR E A T

ME N

OF

GE N I U S

Friday, May 26 ~ L. Ron Hubbard

"No man who is not himself honest can be free — he is his own trap."

Bigamist, occultist, and charismatic science fiction author-turned-guru who took 1950's popular psychiatry by storm and went on to create the Church of Scientology: the most celebrity-driven and litigious organization on Earth.

8PM SHARP AT GALAPAGOS ART SPACELocated at 70 North 6th Street between Kent and WytheIn Williamsburg--take the L train to Bedford

Last night’s finale to the fifth season of American Idol was like some Croation’s television-fueled image of the United States, where bouncing bubbles of cleavage harmonize with quakey fat men who hold hankercheifs; where singers-turned-psychics-turned singers again are serenaded by the morbidly obese and the nearly illiterate; where the only thing rewarded more than mockery of the socially disenfranchised is the cultural advancement of soullessness, marketed with the knowing phrase “Soul Patrol,” and brought to you by Coca Cola.

The advertisement, which is itself advertised as the world's first live theatrical commercial, is a creation of Visit London, a tourist organization. There have already been performances of the live commercial on stages in Dublin and Hamburg, said Ken Kelling, Visit London's communications director, and there is to be another on Friday in Pittsburgh. "They're a captive audience," Mr. Kelling said. "They can't switch channels or change over or walk out once the thing is started."

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

UNLESS I acquire some unexpected clout around here in the next 48 hours, Times readers will wake up on Tuesday morning to read a prominent story announcing the nominees for an artistically meaningless, blatantly commercial, shamefully exclusionary and culturally corrosive award competition.

Let me put it another way: unless Times editors have overcome several decades of their own inertia, readers on Tuesday will find a prominent story serving the pecuniary interests of three privately controlled companies whose principals have earned the right to convene in what Damon Runyon once called ''the laughing room.'' That was Runyon's term for the sound-proofed chamber where he imagined that the proprietors of the ''21'' Club gathered to set the day's menu prices. Today's version would be the sanctum where the men who run the Shubert Organization, the Nederlander Organization and Jujamcyn Theaters gather to toast The Times and its generous support of their efforts.

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) told President Bush yesterday that he is concerned the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) raid on Rep. William Jefferson’s (D-La.) congressional office over the weekend was a direct violation of the Constitution.

Hastert raised concerns that the FBI’s unannounced seizure of congressional documents during a raid of Jefferson’s Rayburn office Saturday night violated the separation of powers between the two branches of government as they are defined by the Constitution.

With a thickness of only 9.9mm, compared to the 11.5mm of a Motorola SLVR L7, this LG is thinner than Nicole Richie after a three-day hobo-killing, dog-strangling, Herbie-the-Love-Bug-stealing coke binge.Via Gizmondo.

It's a birthday party for Camille Chen. "Husband" Jaason Simmons has breakfast in the oven and there's about to be a surprise: He and the kids remodeled the den into a game room and won't Mom, a notorious poker fiend, be pleased.

Except Chen and Simmons aren't married, the kids aren't theirs, they don't really live in the house and they're all Centex Homes marketing director Amanda Larson's employees.

They've been hired to lounge around a model home, read magazines and occasionally pretend like they're having breakfast.